The School of Agriculture, Policy and Development, in conjunction with the Centre for Food Security, has recently made a multi-million pound investment in new appointments, state-of-the-art plant growth facilities and a new crop genetics and molecular biology lab. These investments will underpin its ambitious plans to bring together researchers capable of generating novel insights into the basic genetic architecture and resilience of yield-related traits under conditions simulating both norms and extremes of current and future climate variability.

The successful candidate will spearhead a three-year project in Prof O’Sullivan’s newly established Crop Genetic Improvement lab (http://www.reading.ac.uk/staff/d-m-osullivan) to develop an experimental platform for adopting a ‘systems genetics’ approach to yield development in wheat. The role will place approximately equal emphasis on 1. design of large-scale field and climate-controlled experiments to probe traits contributing to yield resilience in large segregating wheat populations, 2. adaptation of existing software and writing custom code to integrate data from various measurement and imaging devices, molecular assays and external data sources into a project database and 3. statistical genetic analysis of the combined genotype, expression and phenotype datasets.

The project will involve multiple collaborations both within the University and externally and therefore we are looking for an enthusiastic and team-oriented candidate with excellent communication skills in addition to the required technical skills and experience.

You will have:

• A PhD in a relevant discipline
• Experience in analysing large biological datasets
• Sound knowledge of statistical genetics
• The ability to design databases and programme data analysis pipelines
• A demonstrated interest in applying your data-related skills to real-world biological questions
• A demonstrated ability to transform ‘data’ into ‘knowledge’

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